"D.Q. (Don Quijote en Barcelona)": claves y reflexiones / D.Q. (Don Quixote in Barcelona): Keys ans reflections
(Article published in the program notes for the premiere of the opera D.Q. (Don Quixote in Barcelona). Barcelona. Gran Teatre del Liceu, October 2000)|
"The only architecture is the moving one,
because although architecture does not have
ability to communicate solutions,
it does have it to transmit emotions". |
About the opera and its problems
Opera is, for the composer, a continuous source of dilemmas, in which temptation and reluctance coexist in a schizoid way, in a frenetic alternation capable of leaving Dr. Jekyll himself and his alter ego Mr. Hyde in diapers. Faced with the seduction of the ultimate in synesthesia (the "total work of art" that Richard Wagner dreamed of), of the sum -impossible, like that of apples and pears- of the infinite number of heterogeneous factors of each of the arts that make it up, and that turns the opera not into an "impossible object", but into an immense territory in which there will always be things to discover, many times defeats the composer, not the difficulty of the undertaking -that, in general, it is an incentive-, but the unpredictability of its result.
The History of Music is nothing other than that of the progressive conquest, by the composers who have succeeded each other over the centuries, of the different parameters that intervene in the musical fact since writing confers it the gift of survival. Quickly brought under control the basic components (pitch and rhythm), the work of "domestication" of those that are more difficult to determine (dynamics, agogic and, in a certain sense, timbre) has kept composers busy for a long period of historical time, having achieved optimal results, in this sense, in the field of electroacoustic music, as it is the only one that up to now has allowed the author to reach the definitive version, fully controlled in all its aspects, of the work. The same does not happen, it is clear, in instrumental music made by human means, in which a part of the final result necessarily escapes the composer's forecasts; but, in any case, he has the illusion, in each composed work, that he has captured in the score everything necessary so that the subsequent interpretations of the music resemble, in a very high percentage, what "sounded like inwardly" at the time of writing.
Perhaps for that reason the composer approaches -if he does- with great respect towards all those musical manifestations in which the unpredictability of the final result is greater than desirable. In the instrumental world, the scant approach to the composition of organ music is paradigmatic, a very complex instrument in which the final decision of the performer regarding the stops is crucial for the final result, since it affects its timbral aspect (and, by extension, the dynamic) and, with it, the ultimate physiognomy of the work. And in the vocal field, of course, the opera represents the entry into a world in which, once the score is finished, everyone who takes part in each production seems to have something to say and to contribute, except the composer.
As far as I am concerned, I must add that the previous reflections are nothing but trifles in the face of the tremendous technical difficulties that the musical use of the text represents, and for which the stage treatment supposes an additional twist. Music? Theater? Literature? Opera is all that, but for this it is necessary that each of these artistic manifestations give up a part of its personality along the way, for the benefit of the symbiosis with the rest. The important thing for the composer is knowing how to detect the limits to which it is possible to take each of them without breaking it, without it ceasing to be identifiable: to what extent is it possible to slow down the rhythm of a scenic situation in favor of slow music, without for that reason it ceases to be theatre, or how far one can go in manipulating the musical aspects of the text (intonation, accents, rhythm) without them ceasing to be present in the song (which is essential to understand its sense and, with this, its meaning) are just two examples of the complexity of the venture, as well as its greatness.
An incipient operatic adventure (Ligazón, a chamber opera in one act, based on the play of the same title by Ramón Mª del Valle-Inclán) quickly convinced me, twenty years ago, of the need for creative, technical and aesthetic maturity, and an in-depth knowledge of the purely linguistic aspects present in the music-text relationship, before undertaking the composition of a new opera, which I had been thinking about for a long time (in fact, a good part of my written works in the last ten years revolve around an opera project, which with Don Quixote in Barcelona has found the ideal opportunity to materialize, and in which they have found definitive accommodation). Only after many years of self-taught and disorganized study of the inner workings of the musical components of the language mentioned above, have I been able to reach my own conclusions about them, which, in general terms, have helped me to know the ground I was treading on and even where it was possible to explore it without losing awareness of its limits. Or, what is the same, deform it without destroying its recognizability.
Who does an opera belong to?
Recent times have meant an authentic revolution for opera that has placed the three eminently creative fronts that make it up in the same first line of importance: thus, music -traditionally considered the most important- has come to share the predominant position that, naturally corresponds to it, with the libretto -which today, unlike in the past, is required to have great literary quality- and with the staging, in which ultimately lies much of the appeal of any production of any title in the repertoire.
All of us who, in one way or another, love opera are pleased that this situation of equivalence has been reached, because we are convinced that the exact conjunction of these three factors is the key to initiating the highly desirable and indispensable renovation of a repertoire which, stagnant for decades in a few basic titles, strongly resists any proposal for renewal. In the same way, all of us who, in one way or another, believe in the validity of opera as a genre in which there is still much to say, are convinced that beyond these equivalences, neither can nor should be reached, by the good of such validity. Because there is no worse enemy of a global concept of a show than the limelight of one of its members. We have proven it ad nauseam with the demands and whims of so many singing stars and divas, who have endangered and made the purity of a performance fail more than once; and the same thing would happen if composers, librettists or stage directors began to exercise that absolutist and despotic role.
In that sense (and forgive me for immodesty), this show, as it will be seen and heard at its premiere at the Liceo, is exemplary: it belongs equally in the creative aspect to La Fura dels Baus, Justo Navarro and the undersigned these lines, without the order of the relationship implying any priority. And I am especially interested in highlighting all of the above, because in this lies, in my opinion, the main innovation of the proposal: contrary to what is usual, here there has not been a musician who for years has begged in the offices of businessmen and managers an opportunity for a score made from the libretto that some writer has made based on a pre-existing story or dramatic piece, and for which, in the best of cases, a staging totally unrelated to the the initial aesthetic intentions, completely lost in those years of pilgrimage.
On the contrary, everything in Don Quijote in Barcelona has been produced with absolute creative synchronization, understanding as such the logical process of intervention of the different components: it is La Fura's responsibility to have summoned Justo Navarro and me to write the libretto and music, respectively, of an opera based on the quixotic myth. From then on, Justo Navarro began to write and I began to compose at the rhythm that he imposed on me. Absolutely the entire process of material realization has taken place in the final order of the show: after the first act came the second, and the third ended the task. And as is logical in a work carried out in close and cordial collaboration, the frequent three-way meetings were, to a certain extent, reciprocally and fruitfully conditioning the work of one and the other. Justo Navarro and I have been enriched by the suggestions of Carlos Padrisa and Àlex Ollé to the same extent that they, logically, will have enriched ours.
Don Quixote in Barcelona: Literary and conceptual aspects
And having said all of the above, it seems the time has come to talk in detail about Don Quixote in Barcelona, as well as to provide the viewer with some essential keys to enable a direct understanding of the show, which is not usually easy in the case of a new work. Following the suggestion by Àlex Ollé and Carlos Padrisa to take Don Quixote as a starting point, thus forcing Spanish operatic creation to offer, at the turn of the millennium, a double operatic vision (that of Cristóbal Halffter and this one) of the Spanish classic myth par excellence, Justo Navarro's highly ingenious dramatic proposal quickly began to suggest a wide range of scenic and musical solutions.
I think I speak in the name of all the participants in the creation of this opera if I affirm that what attracted us above all to Cervantes's novel is not the story itself told, but the way it is told: what could be called the metanovel. Thus, over and above the well-known quixotesque adventures, more attractive for a thought clinging to the classical and romantic tradition and, therefore, affection to the purely narrative, or simply human values of the character, for all of us the truly dazzling thing about Cervantes' work it is the absolute modernity of its approach as a book, in which everything is contained, but which encompasses a wide range of other aspects, the formal ones, no less suggestive.
That conviction quickly led us to rule out the mise en musique of one or several scenes or "stamps" of the novel, since this would have meant such a conventional approach to the suggested theme that, no matter how innovative the strictly musical proposal would have been, it would have conferred an inevitably traditional character to the overall sense of the show. That is why we prefer to bet from the beginning on the opposite way, without caring about the use of traditional musical elements and procedures -quite the contrary: forcing their presence for the benefit of musical dramaturgy-, in the certainty that putting them at the service of an intention current stage performance would infuse them with a new vigor and energy.
In short, for us it is not so much Don Quixote that matters, but Cervantes' wonderfully brilliant creative talent, which is revealed to us through a complex system of literary artifices as attractive in themselves as the novel itself: suffice it to remember the way in which the author himself gets in and out of the pages of his work, saves himself from burning books and even allows himself to compete with his rival, Avellaneda, in the second part, where he even writes down a first bibliography of the first. With all this, and through a complex plot of superimposed narratives, the traditional security of the novel reader, based on the control of the different structural planes, falters as facing a violent seismic-aesthetic movement in front of which no cultural foundations can resist.
In this lies the full actuality of Don Quixote, and in the face of all this, for today's readers, what is undoubtedly paramount in Cervantes' thought is unimportant: the parodic intention of his novel, which, to be fully understood, it requires knowledge of the books of chivalry which he intended to ridicule by means of fierce satire. And the fact that in our days the books that served Cervantes as a reference have fallen into oblivion, but nevertheless we continue to enjoy Don Quixote, is irrefutable proof that the novel imposes itself, both for its plot, that it enjoys autonomy from the parodic references that inspire it, as well as from its unquestionable literary quality.
Our scenic proposal, however, wishes to approach that original, fundamental pretext of the novel, through a triple parody that, in general terms, is based on the following references:
a) Parody of the opera as a genre, through the use of easily recognizable formal operatic procedures that, in a certain way, characterize the most important characters (such as the arias of the Auctioneer and Pasamonte in act I, or that of Don Quixote and the Trifaldi Sisters in act II), as well as "winks", in the form of more or less rapid bursts, to operas from the traditional repertoire -among which Parsifal plays a prominent role, as could not be least, as the Liceo is the theater that assumes this premiere, as well as El retablo de Maese Pedro, of which, thanks to the kindness of Isabel de Falla, a brief fragment can be heard in the third act in which the original melody of the Trujamán has been adapted to a new text- and that, therefore, will be quickly identified by those who know them, going unnoticed by those who ignore them (as occurs in the innumerable situations in which Don Quixote parodies scenes from the satirized cavalry books, no doubt familiar to the reader of the time, but unknown to the one of today).
b) Parody of Cervantes' own novel. In our opera there are many references to scenes from Don Quixote (the adventure of the galley slaves, Master Peter’s puppet show, the enchanted head, the penance in Sierra Morena, the Courts of Death...), and on which it is appropriate for Justo Navarro to explain; I limit myself to emphasizing how powerfully it caught our attention that Cervantes, in a stroke of brilliant ingenuity, referred to the adventure told in the twenty-third chapter of the second book as apocryphal, in the very title of said chapter. The adventure in question is none other than the narration that Don Quixote makes of what he has seen in the cave of Montesinos, to which he had descended in the previous chapter. Cervantes wants the reader to believe that what happened to Don Quixote in the cave was so incredible that, fearing not to be believed, he did not hesitate to tell a story on his return that was plausible in its madness, but that his friends (and even Cervantes himself, camouflaged here as a skeptical observer) found it as crazy or more than the real thing: the encounter with Montesinos, Durandarte, Belerma and their entourage, all there enchanted by Merlin the magician.
Well then, and to say it with all possible irony, let it be known from now on that Don Quixote in Barcelona is nothing more than the story set to music of the true events that happened to Don Quixote in the cave of Montesinos: believing he entered in the cave, Don Quixote actually makes his appearance in a Geneva auction room, in the distant future, trapped by a time locator machine for ancient wonders, programmed to find him in the past. Don Quixote is sold to a Hong-Kong billionaire as a gift to his daughters, the Trifaldi Sisters, who exhibit him to numerous guests in their Garden of Monsters. The nostalgia for Don Quixote is so great that the sisters decide to return him to where they have the greatest memory of him -that is: to his time-. But instead of being sent back in time, Don Quixote appears in Barcelona in 2004, within an International Congress held to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the novel, and whose purpose is to elucidate the authorship of the book, given the ambiguity with which Cervantes deals in the same matter. The presence of Don Quixote in Barcelona not only brings a great stir to the Congress: at the same time he arouses the forces of nature around him, causing a hurricane that, coming from the sea, devastates the city up the Ramblas. That, and not denying Avellaneda, which makes him travel to Zaragoza, is the real reason why Don Quixote wants to return to Barcelona at the end of the second part of the novel: to undo the wrong caused by his previous visit to the city.
c) Lastly, a parody of what we could call metaquixotism, or everything that has been written about Don Quixote to explain Don Quixote, which today is consubstantial with the reading of the novel and which in our opera focuses on the last act, in the International Congress "Don Quixote de la Mancha".
This is, broadly speaking, our pre-text. With regard to the text, it can be said that the general parodic intention of Don Quixote in Barcelona requires a considerable amount of sense of humor and scenic agility for its realization; but, as happens in Cervantes' novel, this is not an obstacle for the character and his story to become endearing, such is the load of humanity that they ooze. Ultimately, Don Quixote is nothing more than a poor mediocre being who resists a life of eating lentils on Fridays and pigeons on Sundays. Visitors to the Trifaldi Sisters' Garden of Monsters are horrified by his presence upon discovering that he is infected with Time, a deadly, radioactive substance from which their society has known how to free itself at the time and which, at most, can be excavated to recover, among its different layers, the most valuable objects of the past.
Technical and aesthetic aspects
All that dazzling literary approach directly affects the music itself. In the same way that Justo Navarro's text must be fully understood so that the viewer can follow and enjoy the pure theatrical action, the music that supports it must be coupled to it, in the melodic-metric of the vocal parts and in the character (violent, expressive, scherzante, melancholic...) of the different elements and procedures used.
Do not look for a pure artistic product in Don Quixote in Barcelona, obsessed by the extreme novelty of the language used, as a reflection of a rigorous avant-garde aesthetic thought, because any analysis in that direction is doomed to failure, as the show itself will prove. There is no such, nor is there any intention that there be. Now, this should not be understood as meaning that the result does not claim to be current, despite the multiple aesthetic "impurities" that dot it, because the current intention lies precisely in the violent superimposition of tradition and modernity, which acquires full dramatic sense through the literary and scenic dimensions.
Thus, the revelation, for the Visitors of the Garden of Monsters, that Don Quixote is a being that belongs to another era occurs, not only because of what he says ("... and not feeling time, a Merlin that injects me time..."; or "... I want to heal myself from time, not to be who I am, to be Don Quixote."), but because of how he says it, singing the nostalgia of his time in a (tonal) language and a rhetoric (formal: aria) that reveal their origin from another world -the past-, in which time was one of the great scourges of humanity, and from which he has been painfully torn away.
In this way, and by similar procedures -including the quotes, already mentioned, from operas of the repertoire, and the use of openly tonal resources, when it is time that is evoked or comes into play in one way or another-, the constant confrontation between the future and the past transcends from the libretto to the music, from the use of the contemporary together with the traditional, and by force it will have to do so to the scenography and the staging, which however innovative and provocative they may be, as it corresponds and no less is expected of their authors, they will have to contain a large number of identifiable features with which what is current can be measured to be fully so. I refer to the fantastic scenographic solution adopted for the "cage of air and time" (what a wonderful image!) in which Don Quixote is exhibited, to corroborate how the dramatic conflict between tradition and modernity is tangible even in the most insignificant details of this work, be they literary, musical or scenic.
As for the other technical aspects of the score, I think it is worth emphasizing here that the group of voices (made up of two sopranos, a mezzo, a contralto, a sopranist, two tenors, two baritones and two basses, among main and secondary solo roles, in addition to a choir that sometimes adopts a chamber formation) serves as instrumental support, from the pit, an orchestra that, first, out of conviction, and later, due to needs derived from the space, reduces certain elements (such as the woodwind and string sections) for the benefit of others (piano, harp and percussion). At some very specific moments, the sound space will be filled with previously recorded music, either as a "soundtrack" for a projection, or as an unintelligible superimposition, in order to underline certain scenic situations and sonically "envelop" the viewer. And the use of electroacoustic procedures should not be forgotten, the elaboration of which has been carried out by La Fura itself, and in which all those who have wished to do so have been invited to participate via the Internet.
Finally, I think it is interesting to point out that the work of synchronous creation of libretto, music and scenic components forced me from the first moment to a completely unusual way of working. The urgency for Carlos Padrisa and Àlex Oller to have available sound material from which the staging could be designed determined a very rapid process of composition of the main thing, as a starting point: the vocal lines and a script or sketch of its orchestral accompaniment, from which a working model could be elaborated that would give a precise idea of the times and the character of the different scenic situations. I must admit that for me, who performs symphonic works (and an opera obviously is) directly from the orchestral score itself, and not as an instrumentation from a previous script, the experience has not only been highly positive, but I would dare to say that decisive for, given the faster and more direct global perception of the result, to guarantee that the scenic agility required by the text was not going to be lost in benefit of the realization of the orchestral detail, whose laboriousness requires a considerably slower creative tempo. I believe that in this way a greater fluidity and spontaneity of the musical material has been achieved, which has then been carefully orchestrated, now free of constraints and urgencies, until the final score was completed in the summer of 1999.
Epilogue / Dedication
Barely three months after the premiere of this opera, and coinciding with the writing of this article, the world of architecture loses, in full creative maturity, Enric Miralles, one of its most brilliant creators. To the privilege that the scenography of this show is due to his extraordinary talent and his enthusiastic dedication, pain, impotence and rage at the disappearance of an exceptional human being are added.
Faced with an era of fierce rationalism, his aesthetic conviction of integrating ruins and archaeological remains into the new -I refer to his own studio, a paradigm of coexistence between the diachronic and the synchronic-, and his defense of an architecture based on emotion, connect in such a way with my position regarding music, that I trust that the double citation with which I have not been able to resist the temptation to head this article will serve to make it abundantly clear to the viewer our intention to recover for art a component, if not lost, yes forgotten for long years, that can have a place in a rigorously intellectual conception of artistic creation, of which it is also a part and to which it provides complete balance.
The score of Don Quixote in Barcelona is dedicated to his remembrance, with the hope that in this way his memory will remain inextricably linked to that of a work for which, despite being very different from his usual medium, he did not hesitate to deliver the best of his talent, through the creation of a prodigious scenography that he will never get to see, but that those of us who attend this premiere will never be able to forget.
July 2000